Turning Hearts to the Fathers
A Conversation With Thomas C. Oden
Part two of two parts by Kenneth Tanner
Thomas C. Oden is Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Theology at the Theological School of Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, and an ordained United Methodist minister. In the early 1970s, this son of the liberal Protestant tradition discovered the ancient Christian writers, an encounter that reversed his theological vision. Since then he has determined to play a part in faithfully passing on the living Tradition of the Church through his ministry of writing.
Interview
Kenneth Tanner: Ironically, while many Wesleyans, evangelicals, Pentecostals, and Charismatics are discovering the rich deposit of ecumenical orthodox theology, liturgy, and spirituality, many Roman Catholics and Anglicans are abandoning orthodoxy to flirt with the modern spirit. What do you see happening in these two seemingly contradictory trends?
Thomas Oden: In many ways, it’s like two ships moving in opposite directions but toward each other. It is a great tragedy that many of our brightest Roman Catholic theological minds are so obsessed with trying to accommodate the assumptions of modernity that they have virtually forgotten their own classic tradition. Let me illustrate that, in a simple way, by pointing to something I became clearly aware of while in Rome three years ago. I began to be aware that everybody was constantly quoting Vatican II and post-Vatican II sources. And here I was, the Protestant, quoting back to them their own Catholic tradition. I was quoting Denzinger and they were quoting Vatican II! I believe that it’s a deeply serious problem for Protestants that Catholics are rapidly forgetting their own tradition because we have depended on Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox for a long time to sustain the tradition that we could protest against. Of course, the tradition is still intact in the Eastern tradition, and in Rome itself, but more and more in the liberal Catholic setting it is under attack by people like Rosemary Ruether, Leonardo Boff, Hans Küng, and Richard McBrien. The Catholic Church is teeming with these kinds of voices seeming to speak for Catholic theology—above all, Matthew Fox before he became an Episcopalian, and others even flakier than Daniel Berrigan. It seems to be a really serious problem for Protestantism that Catholics are in the process of forgetting themselves historically.
Of course, Protestants have their own problems because of a long period of forgetting themselves historically, and they are only now beginning to wake up. I think both of these communities of discourse need each other, but I do not see enough interaction going on. I have been fairly closely associated with American evangelicals in the last several years and I still feel among some evangelicals a real resistance to Roman Catholics. It reminds you of the feeling of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the religious wars took place, the Inquisition and so forth. Those memories do not die easily. I’m afraid that Protestants still have this strong bias against the deteriorated Medieval tradition, less so against the patristic tradition. But many Protestants are so ignorant of the patristic tradition that there is hardly anything to build on.
Tanner: In your Systematic Theology, in the volume dealing with the Church, you frequently refer to the many “institutional memories” of the various churches. Specifically, you describe how each group views the Church through its own historical memory. Often, the institutional memory of each church family keeps them from transcending their own group long enough to see the perspectives of other churchmen.
Oden: One aspect of becoming a part of the Church as the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic community is enjoying the beauty of hearing the multitude of voices coming from different cultures, different histories other than the one that brought you into the body of Christ. If your only voice is your own denomination or even a single wing of your denomination, then you are to that extent deprived of the catholicity that belongs to the reality of the Church. The Church is catholic even when that part of the Church that I come out of is parochial.
Tanner: An interesting example, from the Protestant side, of the problem of “institutional memories” is the multi-faceted (and often ahistorical debate) between the followers of Calvin and the followers of Arminius on the issue of God’s sovereignty versus man’s free will. In your book The Transforming Power of Grace you shed the light of the ecumenical orthodox consensus on this problem of grace and freedom. It is very interesting to discover that debates took place within the Roman Catholic Church between the Jesuits and the Dominicans that had real similarities between the debates that occurred (and continue to occur) between Calvinists and Arminians.
Oden: Of course, those debates themselves are analogous, in many ways, to the prior debates between Erasmus and Luther, and before them, analogous to the debates between Augustine and the Semi-Pelagians. These are issues that float around throughout history and we often pick them up in our time as if they haven’t been debated before. There are many Calvinists and Wesleyans who think about the predestination question essentially out of the struggle of the Remonstrance and the Counter-Remonstrance with Arminius from 1610–19. This flawed way of thinking theologically out of what is really only one historical moment in the Church has unfortunately skewed the dialogue between Calvinists and Wesleyans in more recent times. But much of this Calvinist-Arminian debate simply is another motif in the larger symphony of ecumenical orthodox conversation in the Church. It’s not exactly a repetition, but it is a rehearsal of a set of issues that have been thoroughly discussed before...
Tanner: ...and without the wonderful theological nuances that were a product of those earlier debates (although some would argue, as I think you do, that these nuances were actually a recovery of the theological vision of the pre-Augustinian Eastern patristic tradition).
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more from the online archives
32.5—September/October 2019
Some Trivial Thoughts on the Study of Philosophy by Graeme Hunter
34.1—January/February 2021
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